[Tonto]

Awesome! Looks like I will be getting Lightroom soon!

Still keen on peoples thoughts of Price of a Mac setup vs a PC RGB Monitor setup will be 23"

[Ash]

Tonto, you should go into your local store to look at the screens yourself. If you're interested in Mac, the iMac/Cinema displays are very good - backlit LED screens with amazing fidelity and contrast. The stand-alone displays for PCs are good too - basically you get what you pay for.

[kheldour]

Hello friends,

I switched to Mac again in 2002, after a very frustrating (and expensive) try in 1998 and my very first computing experience in 1981 on an Apple II.
Since then I have had to install Windows in a side partition from time to time, but main operating is Mac. Currently I use a MacBook Pro (late 2008) with 4GB and 1TB harddrive. Apple Aperture as my main photo-database and Adobe Photoshop CS3 for editing.

[jstevewhite]

Awesome! Looks like I will be getting Lightroom soon!

Still keen on peoples thoughts of Price of a Mac setup vs a PC RGB Monitor setup will be 23"

The Apple cinema displays are SWOP certified and actually less expensive than other SWOP certified monitors (a printing industry standards body for color reference). That said, you'll sometimes find, say, a 1900x1280 monitor going for $600 and a 1920x1080 monitor going for $200 - there may actually be *no difference* in their performance; so many 1920x1080 panels are made for HDTV application that economy of scale reduces their cost. Best bet is to spend some time reading before shopping.

[Tonto]

Blimey,good thing a have a while to think about it this display biz sounds complicated I know its important though.

[65535]

worth noting that apple only sells 21.5 and 27" monitors. the 24 is discontinued and may never return

[crf529]

How would a decent PC system with an RGB accurate monitor compare price wise?

Depends if it's bought off the shelf or built by yourself. OTS pricing will be similar if not more than a Mac, but custom, a PC with the same specs will cost about half as much.

[jstevewhite]

Depends if it's bought off the shelf or built by yourself. OTS pricing will be similar if not more than a Mac, but custom, a PC with the same specs will cost about half as much.

For some definitions of "the same specs"

Try this exercise with the Mac Pro, for instance. Most of the time when people post their "homebuilt Mac Pro Killers" they aren't really comparable machines. You will have trouble finding a workstation board like the one in the Mac Pro, of course - it's custom built. And they use cheap $30 cases - a comparable case to the one used in the Mac Pro is $300+ (coolermaster, etc) But use server motherboard ,chips (Xeons), RAM (fully buffered ECC), and the same quality of case and parts, and you're realizing that the Mac Pro must be a loss leader, despite its high price tag. The Dell Precisions don't even try to compete anymore. My CA 2006 Mac pro is still a useful machine, with four 3Ghz Xeon cores and 16 GB of RAM; it's performance is 10% behind the newest quad core iMacs and 15-20% behind the newest quad-core Mac Pro available. Hard to do that five-year useful life with generic PC components.

Furthermore, you can't "home-build" a competitor for the iMac or the Mac Mini. It's not by accident that Apple builds machines that have no direct PC counterpart except "me-too" machines like the tiny Chinese jobs that pretend to be Mac Minis, or the Gateway and HP iMac ripoffs.

Third party monitors that are as good as Cinema Displays usually cost as much or more, also.

[jstevewhite]

This is precisely how I felt when I made the move from Win2000 to OS9 on a G3. I haven't looked back since.

I still use PCs at work but keep finding that using my Macs is a more pleasurable experience in every way.

Oooh, I hated OS9 and predecessors ( not more than windows, though )... I've always been a *nix fan, and I jumped ship when OSX became "prime time ready". *nix always just worked the way my mind works, and it made me crazy that there weren't *nix variants of ... Oh, Photoshop, Cubase, Logic, Lightwave, etc. All the 'creative' tools I needed. I switched back and forth between windows and linux and *bsd until OSX. Now I have a single windows box that I run Fruity Loops on, a Windows laptop provided by my employer, and the rest are linux and mac boxen. (I'm a systems engineer and run a fairly complex network here at home for testing and development).

At work, we converted the whole engineering team to Mac users - bought 'em as "remote unix workstations". It's amazing how using a Mac for a month will convert even many hard core Windows users

[boriscleto]

This is precisely how I felt when I made the move from Win2000 to OS9 on a G3. I haven't looked back since.

I still use PCs at work but keep finding that using my Macs is a more pleasurable experience in every way.

Oooh, I hated OS9 and predecessors ( not more than windows, though )... I've always been a *nix fan, and I jumped ship when OSX became "prime time ready". *nix always just worked the way my mind works, and it made me crazy that there weren't *nix variants of ... Oh, Photoshop, Cubase, Logic, Lightwave, etc. All the 'creative' tools I needed. I switched back and forth between windows and linux and *bsd until OSX. Now I have a single windows box that I run Fruity Loops on, a Windows laptop provided by my employer, and the rest are linux and mac boxen. (I'm a systems engineer and run a fairly complex network here at home for testing and development).

At work, we converted the whole engineering team to Mac users - bought 'em as "remote unix workstations". It's amazing how using a Mac for a month will convert even many hard core Windows users

I've been using Macs since the System 7 days. First Mac was a Quadra 605 running 7.1.1, later updated to 7.5.

Then a crappy Umax clone and then a Beige G3 running OS 9, then OS X. I tried Linux several times, but never for more than a month or two at a time. The G3 was the last new Mac I bought until the mini in 2009. In the 10 years in between I had a Blue & White G3 for 10.3, a Digital Audio G4 (2x500) for 10.4, and a Quicksilver G4 866 for 10.5.

I can't help but laugh at complaints about sluggish performance from people who never experienced OS X 10.0 on a G3 or 10.5 on a single processor G4.

@65535 - Put your Aperture library on an external disk. With 8 GB of RAM you shouldn't have any performance problems.

[jstevewhite]

I've been using Macs since the System 7 days. First Mac was a Quadra 605 running 7.1.1, later updated to 7.5.

Then a crappy Umax clone and then a Beige G3 running OS 9, then OS X. I tried Linux several times, but never for more than a month or two at a time. The G3 was the last new Mac I bought until the mini in 2009. In the 10 years in between I had a Blue & White G3 for 10.3, a Dual Audio G4 (2x500) for 10.4, and a Quicksilver G4 866 for 10.5.

I can't help but laugh at complaints about sluggish performance from people who never experienced OS X 10.0 on a G3 or 10.5 on a single processor G4.

@65535 - Put your Aperture library on an external disk. With 8 GB of RAM you shouldn't have any performance problems.

I've got a mirror door dual G4 in the other room. Tried to upgrade it with an OWC kit and discovered a hardware problem. But it ran OSX very snappy and quick before I sidelined it (after I replaced the ancient video card!).

@65535 - Here's something I've seen many, many new Mac users get caught by. Hit command-tab, and see how many things you have running. Many, many Mac programs don't close when you hit the Red Dot; they only close THAT WINDOW. If you want to actually close the program, hit command-q. Many times I've gone over to new Mac users' houses who were complaining of performance issues and discovered they had nearly every application on the box running.

Lightroom closes with the red button, though.

[boriscleto]

I've got a mirror door dual G4 in the other room. Tried to upgrade it with an OWC kit and discovered a hardware problem. But it ran OSX very snappy and quick before I sidelined it (after I replaced the ancient video card!).

A Dual G4 sure, but a Single G4 and 10.5 is a bad idea. The Quicksilver runs 10.4 just fine, and I still run it as a file server for non-critical files (my mini only has a 120 GB boot drive).

[Ash]

Many, many Mac programs don't close when you hit the Red Dot; they only close THAT WINDOW. If you want to actually close the program, hit command-q

Assume all programs don't quit when using the red cross button.
It certainly makes a big difference running PS CS3, Bridge CS3, iTunes, iMovie and iDVD all at the same time even on an Intel Duo Core. Definitely close all programs not currently being used.

[65535]

BTW, in case anyone is interested, I ditched the Mac Mini and bought a fully loaded iMac. Much faster.

I don't really like Aperture so much though, so I might switch to Lightroom.

[einstrigger]

Anybody have experience with the latest Macbook Air (w/ Thunderbolt)? I'm looking at either getting one of these or one of the new Ultrabooks coming in Nov (Asus, Toshiba, Acer). So far I'm liking the Mac more because it has a higher resolution display (1440x900 vs. 1366x768 on most laptops) and backlit keyboard. I wanted to mainly use it for tethered shooting during the occasional location shoots. I've seen issues with the wifi dropping, so I was wondering what's been everyone else's experience (likes or dislikes).